


Another Way Home

by frith_in_thorns



Category: Shadows of the Apt - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Reunions, complicated families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 04:35:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5234336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frith_in_thorns/pseuds/frith_in_thorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes children come back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Way Home

**Author's Note:**

> Major spoilers herein for _Seal of the Worm_ \-- this is a little coda for Sten and Tisamon and Tynisa. They deserve it.
> 
> Encouraged and beta-read by sholio.

Tynisa was a spindly, stripling child, which gave her an advantage in the sprint. She kicked up clouds of evening dust which would make Che cough but not dent the grim determination of those much shorter, plump legs to keep up. And although Tynisa knew, as always, that she should slow down and be more careful, she didn't.

Never had. Never would.

Che wasn't behind her this time. Tynisa, heedless as always, had raced so far ahead that she had outpaced even the sight of her sister. And it was a place for Che to be, really, this airfield, although it was planted with trees in a manner which surely wasn't strictly safe.

She was aware of how she changed in their shadow. A tall girl, beautiful, honed and deadly. In control and not; scarred and broken and still proud. 

She thought, _I am a weapon, much tempered,_ but that thought left her melancholy, because she would rather have had more of the fires to have been of her choosing.

Still she ran, scarred and aching, and then she was all of a sudden a little girl again running home to her foster-father's proud arms. Because he turned at the airship's boarding-plank and reached out to her, her name a whisper on his lips. 

He would have swept her up as if she were truly a child again, but it was the other man who brought her back to more recent memories of herself. Tisamon stood tall and quiet, but his graveness had fallen away and she saw for the first time the man her mother had loved. She didn't flinch from the evaluation of his eyes, but neither did she look for his judgement. She had grown beyond that, and she let her scars write that across her face. He bowed his head respectfully at what he read there.

Sten's hand was trembling as he reached out to stroke her face, and she remembered that he had only seen her whole and beautiful. _And alive,_ her thoughts added, belatedly. She had grown used, in the underground prison of the Worm, to thinking of everyone she had ever known as beyond her reach forever, whether by their death or her own. 

"My darling girl," Sten said, hoarsely. He too looked younger than she had ever seen him. He even held himself taller.

"Che's safe," Tynisa told him, first, because however he looked she couldn't imagine him not worrying.

"You always took care of her," he said, and she had been right — an additional care visibly lifted from him.

"She took care of me," Tynisa corrected him. She had felt, in a dark, quiet space between _there_ and _here_ , the passing of a constricting presence from the world. And she had felt her sister's mingled grief and elation, and so was certain of the final victory that she herself had been a small piece of. "Everything she did — I don't know if I can even describe it."

"Later," Tisamon promised her. It was the first time he had spoken, and his voice was quiet and gentle. Again, she thought of her mother, and for a moment she could hear that voice speaking words of love over her cradle.

In another lifetime.

"Father," she said to him, and then worried that she betrayed Sten by not having also greeted him as such, when his approval and affection had never had to be earned but had always been the solid, unquestioned background to her childhood. But he smiled as if it brought him equal joy to hear his oldest friend addressed so.

Tisamon enfolded her briefly in his arms, and there was nothing measured or guarded in him now. "Daughter of mine," he murmured, breath warm on her cheek, and it was only pride and love she felt from him.

The airship creaked and rattled in the wind, eager to be away. Tynisa broke away to look up at it, and a whisper of uncertainty entered her heart. "Are you leaving?" she asked. For surely this was what Sten would be about, and Tisamon would follow wherever he led.

"Are you coming with us?" Sten asked. And there was anxiety in his eyes again, which she could read clear as speech — had she nothing better to do than follow him, when he had only ever led her into peril and tragedy?

Tisamon, though, showed her a smile free of doubt. "Of course she is," he said. "Although she may grow tired of us eventually and find her own way."

Sten broke from his reverie and shook his head ruefully. "They all grow up," he commented; the ageing professor.

_And sometimes they come home again._

Tynisa took her fathers' hands. Sten's grasp was secure and comforting; Tisamon's smile was slow and deep as a sunrise.

Together, they walked towards the sky.


End file.
